In Des Por-ate Times: Ultima Forever

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I’d pay a substantial sum to visit Britannia again in a new adventure worthy of Ultima VII, which is, without a doubt, one of the games that made me. I probably wouldn’t play Ultima Forever even if it was free though and that’s at least partly because it’s free. EA/Bioware’s newly announced title is a “cross-platform action RPG” launching under the same Play4Free label as Battlefield Heroes. What price virtue, I wonder, and I mean it quite literally. How many tiny coins will I have to collect or purchase to redeem the virtues of Britannia. Scant details below.

These really are the most boring details ever but let’s see if we can create a little excitement. There are TWO classes to choose from, although more MAY be announced. The first is a FIGHTER with a body so robust that he is actually a CUBE and looks a bit like he fell out of TORCHLIGHT. The FIGHTER will protect his ALLIES and smite his enemies.

What about that mage, EH? He’s skinny and has a staff in his HAND and a spell on his LIPS. He’ll assist his ALLIES, which is a bit like protecting them but WITH SPELLS.

You and your CHUMS will, presumably, TRAVEL across BRITANNIA fighting all sorts of MONSTERS but taking time out to GET PISSED IN VARIOUS PUBS. Then you’ll lie on a BEDROLL under the stars, MURDER EVERYONE IN THE NEXT TOWN for no reason other than to PUSH AT THE INCREDIBLY FLEXIBLE BOUNDARIES OF THIS INCREDIBLY INCREDIBLE WORLD and realise that you could HAPPILY SPEND YOUR LIFE THERE.

Or not. Maybe not.

I think it’s the invitation to accept “the challenge from Lady British” that made me actively grumpy. Lord British is away, you see, so it’s only natural to have a Lady version to take his place. If she invites people to the challenge while wearing a push-up bra or a chainmail bikini I’ll probably explode and be dead.

Thankfully, the reason Lord British can’t be with us in Ultima Forver is because he’s working on his own New Britannia which…IS A BLOODY SOCIAL NETWORK GAME? Crumbs. Maybe they’ll both be brilliant but I worry that next year I’ll be writing about Ultima and Robin.

Beta signups for Ultima Forever, which is coming to PC and iPad, are now open.

Adam, I’ll gladly join you in paying that substantial sum. I’d even go so far to kidnap some EA exec’s wittle doggie and putting a magic sword against its adorable widdle head. (Are you also a console player in addition to being a PC man? The closest I’ve come to the Ultima VII feeling is Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, strangely enough.)

Absolutely – although it’s funny how you’d feel like that in an isometric perspective game where the stars are forever beyond your field of vision. That’s what Ultima (especially around UVII) excelled at, though – making you see the stars even while you’re in isometric perspective. :-)

There is going to be no System Shock 3 from EA since they don’t own the series, they only had the exclusive publishing rights Looking Glass owned the actual System Shock ip which sadly is now in the holding with a insurance company.

I remain in a state of perpetual disappointment that almost nobody has tried to replicate the best parts of pre-2000 Ultima Online. Player housing. Boats! Clothes that could be worn over armor. No classes, no levels, no gear treadmill. The ability to play as a pure crafter.

The scant few MMOs that attempt something like UO wind up focusing so heavily on PvP to the exclusion of all the other fun parts. Bah.

While hardly doing the same thing, I find EVE Online to be very close to UO’s overall gameplay feel. No levels, no farming for gear, a universe that’s shaped by the players but does not require you to PVP at all. And you can be a full time crafter if you want to.

What is it now? The third time EA have killed this franchise? I’m not sure I haven’t been keeping track

Anyways as far as I can tell this game goes completely against everything the original Ultima games were based around. I’ve never played them but that seems to be the consensus from people who have. My question is do EA even understand what type of game IP they have here? Are any Ultima fans here going to be interested in the direction of this game at all, especially considering that EA wrecked the series once before?

To top it all off its being made by Bioware has absolutely no meaning anymore. Half the studios at EA are called Bioware, which one is making it. I highly doubt it involves the studios which made DA and ME and the only people involved in Ultima games would know this. I dunno it just seems like its doomed to fail.

It really is a rather odd thing to do. But then this is the company that went through exactly the same baffling decision process once before and ended up with Syndicate.

Hmm their formula must be something like:

profit = people who will buy anything + people familiar with franchise but no real idea of what it is - (cost of coming up with something new + people who do not look kindly on bastardisation of beloved franchise + people who are more discerning about how to spend their money) + how much DLC we can flog

There is the possiblity that it’s not even a real studio making it. When EA was going nuts renaming all of their studios to “Bioware”, Several full time employees, a bunch of pets, a few children, at least one intern, and an EA executive’s penis were all accidently renamed “Bioware”.

Uhm, is EA trolling us now? Lady British? Why even use the Ultima name here? Given the graphical style and gameplay description – they are clearly not aiming at anyone who has played old Ultimas. So if it’s for the new generation of gamers – why even bother with the name?

This is just wrong, I’m an Ultima fan from a long time, and what really saddens me is that thanks to EA the franchise has been utterly ravaged, so much that there’s nothing left. For me Ultima is dead, well, almost, I still patiently wait the remake of Ultima IX (link to cfkasper.de), I even bought Morrowind specifically for that purpose (it was a good purchase anyway).

EA is the exact oposite of King Midas: they corrupt everything they touch.

TWO MAY FIGHTER CUBE TORCHLIGHT
FIGHTER ALLIES EH?
HAND LIPS ALLIES WITH SPELLS
CHUMS TRAVEL BRITANNIA
MONSTERS GET PISSED IN VARIOUS PUBS
BEDROLL MURDER EVERYONE IN NEXT TOWN
PUSH AT THE INCREDIBLY FLEXIBLE BOUNDARIES OF THIS INCREDIBLY INCREDIBLE WORLD
HAPPILY SPEND YOUR LIFE THERE
IS A BLOODY SOCIAL NETWORK GAME

I’m starting to think EA just keeps resurrecting old franchises so that when the reboots fail they can say “see, I told you there was a reason we didn’t make any more of those games. Now shut up about System Shock 3 already.”

Shhhhhhhhhhhhh! Don’t say stuff like that! This might be the way gaming as an art form dies definitively: The few games that actually came close to being art will be “remade” (the word has an almost China Mieville-esque ring to it in this context) and commercialized to death. Horrible. Horrible.

There is going to be no System Shock 3 from EA since they don’t own the series, they only had the exclusive publishing rights Looking Glass owned the actual System Shock ip which sadly is now in the holding with a insurance company.

Depends on what you call rgeat. Was the gameplay nice ? Yes. Was the story nice ? Pretty much no. The avatar come , and literraly completely mess up a world, the virtues be damned, just to go back to britania. I think it should be named the anti-ultima.

It was the first crpg to properly tackle “adult” themes (sex, murder, drugs, cultism) in a mature way and thus treat the player as a mature person. It had witty dialogue, hours of exploration and fun things to see and do. At the time, it was technically superb, and there’s no doubt that it paved the way for many modern crpgs.

Despite being old enough to remember the 70’s (just) the Ultima games passed me by too. I think by the time i had a pc powerful enough to run them they were on like Ultma 6 or something and I felt I’d missed the boat.

Spoony’s Ultima retrospective is a great jumping off point though and well worth a watch, although recognising how ground breaking they were now does make me sad that I didnt take the time to experience them the first time round

Ultima was a experimental series of RPGs, I say experimental because Richard Garriott would always do new things with each installment of the series from introducing a party based system in Exodus to the virtues, morality, and conversation trees or a early form of them in Quest of the Avatar, other inovations that orginiated in Ultima games, open world sandbox game play, npc schedules, day and night cycles, interactable worlds, real time action combat(Pagan), early 3d Ultima Underworld 1+2 and so on. The best of the series is Ultima 7 though the combat is weak as hell in that game but it had the most flesh out world of any rpg and ground breaking interactable world you could turn on street lights, kill people grab their corpses and get them resurrected by Lord British, hell you could even harvest wheat in the fields,fetch water from the well grind it into flour add water to make dough and bake it to make bread, you can even temper blades at a forge and make a sword.

Call me old fashioned but i prefer to play a game first before i condemn it. Just because its not gonna be a hardcore crpg doesn’t mean it wont be fun and with so little info available the only reason i can see to hate on it at the moment is that hating on EA is the cool thing to do. I expect that from the man-children commenting here but not a respectful gaming site I suppose its my fault for setting my standards to high i guess.

Oh you old folk. Always grumbling that new things aren’t the same as old things. You realise the appearance of new things you don’t like doesn’t cause the old things you do like to retroactively vanish, right?

Theres an interview with Paul Barnett, creative director at BioWare Mythic, on Kotaku (link to kotaku.com) where he says, and I quote:

“It’s like when someone tells you to read Chaucer,” Barnett commented. “I know it’s supposed to be brilliant, but it’s incomprehensible!” Shifting from literature to film, he compared it to Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 Soviet film that pioneered many techniques that nearly all movies have used since. “I mean, I’m aware that Battleship Potemkin defined modern cinema, but it’s not a great view. You watch it and go, ‘it’s black and white and a bit crap, I’d rather watch something else.’ And that’s basically the problem we’ve been faced with, is how to reimagine and reboot a classic and make it so that there’s a new generation that can have an Ultima.”

I can’t speak for anything else, but he’s sort of right about Chaucer. I had to read the unmodernized version of Troilus and Cressida for a class, and it was brutal. It took me about an hour to get through 20 pages of text, and the I would have a vague idea of what was said. I had to read the version in standard modern English to understand the book well enough to talk about it intelligibly, and then would read the old version out loud to get a sense of rhythm.

He just phrased it poorly. It’s by no means bad, it’s just inaccessible.

It’s a dumb, chintzy looking webpage. And I would by no means hold high hopes for this game. But literally all that we know about it right now is that Bioware is making it, you can play either a fighter or a mage, it will be an action RPG (which is a term that covers a broad, broad spectrum of cases up to and including Ultima VII, you know, the Ultima most people seem to regard as the best game in the entire franchise), and there will be the option to play cooperatively. Oh, and that it will use some variety of free to play payment model. Is this really enough detail to conclude that the game will be a terrible travesty that ruins the franchise name? Really? Cause in my book, that’s not enough to conclude a damn thing.

And don’t even start with “Oh no its EA who’s doing it”, Bioware for all intents and purposes is EA. They’re not a Blizzard which can still call most of its own shots. EA slaps their(Bioware’s) name on every new title in the hopes of garnering some extra money through brand loyalty recognition, completely oblivious to the fact that they are saturating their own name to the point of worthlessness.

There was a time when Bioware used to mean something. Great RPGs and good stories. Now… I don’t even know what they are now.